


one of those new wave boys

by glorious_spoon



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Insomnia, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Platonic Cuddling, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 02:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19820884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: It probably should feel more awkward than it does.(Or: Steve and Robin go on a road-trip, drink, listen to music, and look after each other. And yeah, maybe there's some cuddling involved too.)





	one of those new wave boys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alessandriana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandriana/gifts).



> This is for the AO3 Migrant Aid Fic Exchange for alessandriana, who donated to Border Angels. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title from 'Teenage Wildlife' by David Bowie.

Steve lets the strap of his duffel bag slither through his hands to land with an ominous _thud_ on the puke-green carpet.

“So, uh,” he says as brightly as he can. “This is nice.”

On the upside: there are in fact two beds. The broad wink the clerk tipped him when he asked for two queens instead of a king had him a little worried on that count. The bedspreads are the same puke-green as the carpet and bear ominous stains, like maybe they were used at some point to roll up a body in the trunk of somebody’s car, but there are two of them. Robin ducks her head into the bathroom, makes a quietly horrified exclamation, crosses the room to drop herself and her suitcase onto the bed closest to the window, and flops backward with a sigh.

“I don’t even care,” she mumbles. “Oh my god. Why are we doing this again?”

“Hey,” Steve says, tossing his duffel bag in the general direction of the other bed. The walkie-talkie clanks again when it hits the headboard, and he winces. If he breaks that, Dustin is going to actually murder him in his sleep. “This is _your_ roadtrip of self-discovery. I’m just, like. The chauffeur, or whatever.”

“I regret everything, let’s just sleep in the car.”

“The room’s not that bad, come on.”

“I think someone died in this bed,” Robin says, pushing herself upright, shoving her hair behind her ears. A worn-down road-trip sleepiness around the corners of her eyes. She dozed most of the way through central Indiana, but it was around dawn when they headed out and exhaustion is settled into their bones. Steve can feel it dragging at him, a dull lassitude.

“I’m sure they clean them,” he yawns. “What time is your campus tour?”

“Three? Or, wait.” She flops forward to pull her bag to her and dig through it, finally coming up with a sheaf of papers bearing the University of Chicago logo. “Three-thirty.”

“That’s like two hours from now, plenty of time to nap,” Steve decides, kicking off his shoes and falling backward against the mattress. It creaks ominously beneath him, but the bedspread doesn't smell like anything worse than bleach and stale cigarettes. He shoves his hair out of his face, closes his eyes, hears Robin snort out loud. “Wake me up when it’s time to go.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Robin sighs, but it sounds amused. Possibly even fond.

Steve sticks his thumb up without opening his eyes. “I think you mean _charming and generous_ , and oh, also, _thank you, Steve, for giving me a ride at ass o’clock in the morning_ , something like that.”

“Thank you, Steve, you’re _so_ charming and generous,” she parrots in the snidest tone possible, and he can’t help grinning. There’s a suspiciously giggly-sounding snort, and then the other mattress creaks as she stands up. “I’m going to go find something to eat. You want anything?”

“I’m good,” Steve yawns, and waves her off, listens to the sound of her footsteps on the carpet, the creak of the door. Peels his eyes open just long enough to make sure that it’s locked, then lets them slip shut.

He doesn’t actually mean to doze off, but sleep has been proving elusive in the past few months.

Oh, who the hell is he kidding? He hasn’t been able to sleep reliably or well since Christmas of 1983, when a horror from another dimension slithered out of Jonathan Byers’ ceiling and tried to eat his face. Nightmares are par for the course these days, and getting his face pounded in by Russian intelligence officers was really just the icing on that particular shit cake.

Anyway, no nightmares this time, or at least not any that he can remember. He comes awake, groggy and disoriented, when the door to the room creaks shut, and then there are footsteps on the floor and Robin leans down to press something cold to his belly where his shirt has ridden up. Steve yelps, flails, opens his eyes. His cheek is sticky with drool, the bedspread beneath his face damp. He tugs a hand through his hair to find it flattened and disheveled.

It’s probably just as well that Robin was never going to consider sleeping with him no matter how appealing he is. Or isn’t. His mojo seems to have taken a permanent hike since high school.

Point is, one of the many nice things about Robin is that she doesn’t give a shit. It takes the pressure off. She waits for him to clamor upright, then holds out a can of Coke. “Time to go. I got you a pop.” She eyes him for a moment, then adds, “Pretty sure I could score some cocaine if that’d work better. You look like shit.”

“Very fucking funny,” Steve sighs, taking the can. It’s icy cold and beading condensation against his palm, and he cracks it open, chugs half of it in one go, burps. “Thanks.”

“It’s a complete mystery to me how you’ve ever gotten anybody to sleep with you,” Robin says. Steve thinks about pointing out that he’s still pretty sure he’s doing better on that count than she is, but that seems kinda mean, all things considered.

“I’m a man of many talents,” he says instead, raising his eyebrows significantly. She snorts and rolls her eyes, and he finishes the pop, slides off the bed, and goes to see about making himself more or less presentable.

*

He drops Robin off at the edge of campus near the admissions office, where all the wide-eyed future college students are congregating. Most of them have parents in tow, heavy backpacks slung over their shoulders, bright, hopeful expressions on their faces.

Robin offers to let him tag along for the tour to see if he can manage to pick up college girls who haven’t seen him slinging ice cream in a sailor suit, but he waves her off. Lately he’s been in a state of what Dustin likes to call _persistent ennui—it’s like an exhaustion of the_ soul _, Steve, stop laughing at me, I’m serious._

Anyway, tagging along with all the smart nerds like Robin who are heading into their bright new futures seems like a depressing way to spend an afternoon, and they passed by a record store on their way in. He has his boombox with him, and browsing for new tapes sounds infinitely more appealing. Especially with the prospect of the horrified faces Robin is probably going to make at whatever he ends up getting.

The shop is small and dusty and smells like patchouli and pot. Nothing seems to be organized in any particular kind of way, and Steve passes a pleasant couple of hours there, wandering under the tacked-up posters of Bob Marley blowing smoke at the camera and Bruce Springsteen’s denim-clad ass in front of the American flag, Aretha Franklin pinned up next to him as regal and elegant as a queen. Nobody else comes in while he’s there, and the wizened old hippie at the counter ignores him completely until he comes up to the counter with a stack of tapes, and for a while after that, too.

“Hey,” Steve says eventually. “Can I buy these?”

“Sure, I guess, if you want,” the guy says, rusty and so indifferent that Steve can’t even be offended. Just gawks at him, half-amused, while he rings it all up on an old-fashioned register and accepts the cash Steve hands him in knotted hands, nails yellowed with nicotine.

*

Robin does make an appalled face back at the hotel, sitting on the floor with their heads tilted back against the mattress and passing a bottle of illicitly-acquired vodka back and forth between them. “Oh, my god, you actually _bought_ these?”

“What’s wrong with Mr. Mister?” Steve asks, not even bothering to hide his grin.

“I don’t have time to give that question the kind of answer it deserves,” she says, reaching for the next cassette. Then she pauses. “Okay, David Bowie, that’s surprising. You’re forgiven.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, digging a cigarette out of the crumpled pack at the bottom of his bag. He lights it and offers it to Robin, who takes a drag and then hands it back. Smoke curls up in the yellow lamplight. “Why’s that surprising?”

Robin hesitates, pulling her bottom lip in between her teeth like she’s thinking, then she shrugs and pops the cassette into the tape deck. “No reason. I’m just always surprised when you have good taste. In anything.”

He kind of feels like that wasn’t everything she meant to say, but the speakers are crackling through the intro to _It’s No Game_ , and instead of asking he tilts the bottle to his lips and passes it back to Robin, takes a slow drag on the cigarette and blows smoke out into the hazy dusk of the room.

Maybe, just maybe, he’ll actually be able to sleep tonight.

*

_Lights flash above him and there’s the wet stink of rot all around, growling in the distance as his feet pound the forest floor, the nail bat slippery in his hands. Something catches at his ankle and he goes down hard, and the monster is springing onto him, slamming him to the ground, its face opening up like some sick toothy flower._

_Someone screams his name. Dustin, Dustin is screaming his name, and it’s Billy Hargrove above him suddenly, straddling him and laughing and his fists are wet with blood, and Nancy says, “Bullshit, it’s all bullshit,” and the floor is falling away beneath him and he’s in freefall—_

Hands on his shoulders, warmth and the sudden jolt of it, and the room is flooded with light. “Steve. Steve!”

He shoves himself away, scrambles backward, heart pounding and hands grasping for a weapon, and hits the headboard. It rattles with the impact of his shoulders, and he finally opens his eyes.

The lamp is on, the motel room filled with dusty yellow light. Robin is sitting on the edge of his bed in cut-off sweats and a baggy Hawkins Marching Band t-shirt, messy hair, wide eyes. Her hands are up, palm out.

Steve lets his head fall back against the headboard with a groan and closes his eyes. “Shit,” he sighs. And then, “Sorry.”

“Nightmare?” Robin asks cautiously.

“What gave you that idea?” he says, but it doesn’t come out as light as he means it to. His heart is speeding, and he can feel his hands start to shake as the adrenaline rush leaches out of him. His voice is shaky too. 

So much for a quiet fucking night of sleep.

He opens his eyes in time to see Robin lift one shoulder. “You were yelling.”

Steve grimaces, scrubs a hand through his hair. “I uh. I don’t get them that often anymore. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s fine,” Robin says. He opens his mouth, and she says, “ _Steve_ , it’s fine. You think I don’t get them? The Mind Flayer, or that fucking elevator, or—”

“Yeah, yeah, more than enough trauma to go around, I get it,” Steve grumbles, but he actually feels a little better. “Still. I’m sorry for waking you up.”

“Shut up,” Robin says gently. “Look, do you want to just—watch TV for a little while, or something?”

“Yeah,” Steve sighs, because there’s no way he’s going to sleep anytime soon and that sounds a hell of a lot better than _talking_ about it. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

He expects her to go back to her own bed after turning the TV on, fiddling with the rabbit ears until a grainy rerun of M*A*S*H comes in, but she doesn’t. She drops onto the mattress next to him, flips the lamp off, and elbows him in the side. “Move over, dingus.”

“What?”

“Move over.” Robin’s chin is up, and there’s something challenging in her eyes, like she’s just daring him to say something. Steve knows better than to pick a fight with Robin when she looks like that, though, so he just shifts over until she has room to settle against the headboard next to him, a comforting line of heat against his side. He can smell her drug-store shampoo and the lingering hint of menthol smoke and he breathes in as she settles her cheek against his shoulder, lets the scent fill his nose and drown out the memory of that tunnel, the rotting stink of animate vines. “Klinger was always my favorite.”

“Huh?”

“Klinger,” Robin repeats. Her breath is warm against his neck, and he can feel the shape of her jaw against his collarbone as it moves. It probably should feel weirder than it actually does. Like, yearning, or something, some kind of heartbroken synonym from Nancy’s thesaurus. It’s been months since he’s let himself think about Robin like that, though, and that crush seems to have died a quiet, peaceful death while he wasn’t paying attention. It’s just—nice, having someone here, a warm familiar body to anchor him in reality. He can feel his muscles start to unwind, that shaky adrenaline feeling dissipating. “I always liked him.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. On the TV, Klinger is plopped down in front of Col. Blake’s desk in a tall hat and lacy gloves. The image warps for a moment, then settles as Blake says, ‘ _Uh, Klinger, the rifle makes me nervous. Actually, the purse does too’._ “Yeah, me too.”

“I knew there was good taste buried in there somewhere,” Robin murmurs, and Steve laughs against her hair, finally allows himself to relax.

He dozes off to the sound of a staticky laugh track from the TV and wakes to the thin gray light of dawn coming in through the blinds and the sound of snoring. The TV is dark; Robin must have gotten up and turned it off at some point after he fell asleep, but she’s not back in her own bed. She’s pressed up against Steve’s side instead, curled in a ball with her knees digging into the outside of his thigh. Her hair is loose across her face, moving slightly with her soft snores.

It should probably be weird. Steve’s never slept with anybody that he wasn’t, well, _sleeping_ with. It isn’t, though. He feels warm and comfortable, pleasantly drowsy in a way he hasn’t in a while, no lingering nightmares fading from his mind. He shifts slightly until Robin’s knee isn’t digging a hole in his leg, and she snorts, rolls away, and opens her eyes.

“Whazza?” she mumbles, and then, “Shit, sorry,” and starts to sit up.

“Go back to sleep,” Steve yawns, burying his face in the pillow. It’s early. If they’re going to be awkward about this, it can wait.

Robin makes a soft sound like a snort, or maybe a laugh, and then the mattress shifts as she lays back down. She pats him clumsily on the shoulder with one hand, then leaves it there, a warm point of contact as he slips back down into sleep.


End file.
